


Four reasons why Donna Sheridan went to Kalokairi, and one reason why she stayed

by El Staplador (elstaplador)



Category: Mamma Mia! (2008)
Genre: 5 Things, Backstory, Community: 52fandoms, F/M, Gen, Greek island, Internal Monologue, Internalised Misogyny, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-23
Updated: 2013-01-23
Packaged: 2017-11-26 15:44:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/651904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elstaplador/pseuds/El%20Staplador
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you see the wonder of a fairy tale<br/>You can take the future even if you fail</p>
            </blockquote>





	Four reasons why Donna Sheridan went to Kalokairi, and one reason why she stayed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Giglet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Giglet/gifts).



_1\. To get some peace and quiet_

'I was sick and tired of everything,' Donna hummed as she wandered along the beach, 'when I called you – who's _you_? - last night from Athens. All I do is eat and sleep and sing...'

It was true. This tour had been six months already, and the end was so far off as to be unimaginable; it had been two years running before that. She was exhausted; Rosie and Tanya were exhausted. She had left them crashed out in their shabby hotel on the mainland, bribed a local to run her over to Kalokairi, the little island, just so that she could have a few hours on her own. To _think_.

She luxuriated in the feeling of warm sand under her bare feet (another four hours in platform boots tonight, oh God), the pure light of the climbing sun (another night in the glare of the spotlight), let the gentle lapping of the waves soothe her, calm her. (Tonight, again, the shrieking thrumming speakers, the roaring crowd.) A year ago she had loved it, still.

Now – she was tired.

  
 _2\. To be alone - together_

She remembered; it was impossible to forget. Those three nights – well, but she had to be honest, didn't she: Harry made her smile, and Bill made her laugh, but there was nobody to touch Sam.

Those furtive, giggling, late-night trips, the murmuring expanse of black water – the throaty roar of the boat's engine, or the steady _creak-splash_ of the oars.

They were so different, the three of them: Bill, hearty and enthusiastic, tickling her mercilessly as she traced the eye-tattoos on his knees. Harry, heartbreakingly courteous, suddenly _not_ the Head Banger, but someone younger, less cynical, less confident.

Oh, but Sam...

They spent _days_ on Kalokairi, she and Sam (in fact, she knew the Dynamos were dying when she started skipping rehearsals to go exploring with him). They stumbled across the villa early in July, and fell in love, scrambled delightedly around the crumbling building, made the house on the island a castle in the air.

'It wouldn't take much,' Sam said, eyes gleaming with the enthusiasm of a new-fledged architect. 'It's a summer's work, perhaps, to get it liveable, and then you would start letting rooms while you did the exciting stuff. Look -' he scored a few decisive lines across his napkin, and a fairy-tale palace arose before Donna's eyes.

  
 _3\. To think_

Months later, heartsick and pregnant, her mother's words still ringing in her ears, she would go across to Kalokairi on the days when Sophia Anderson didn't need her, and sit on the beach and wonder.. Whether she really was a stupid, reckless little slut. Whether the Dynamos would have wound up anyway. Whether Tanya was really going to be happy with her fifty-five year old husband. Whether Rosie would make it on her own. Whether she'd ever fit into a spangled catsuit again. If Sam and Lorraine were nauseatingly happy. How she was ever going to afford to raise a child.

The island never answered her questions, but, if she was lucky, those few hours alone with the sun and the sea settled her, quieted her, until the questions really didn't matter.

  
 _4\. To prove she could make it there on her own_

The day she put her inheritance down on the agent's desk, and received the deeds to the villa, she rowed across to the island on her own. It was stupid and reckless, and completely unnecessary, and she never did it again, but she had to do it, just to prove that it was hers now, that it was where she belonged.

She built the villa almost from nothing, despite him, to spite him, though he would never know, not unless he spent his respectable married London evenings scouring the brochures of the more obscure Greek tourist operators. No, it was more than that: she owed it to him (and to their child, little Sophie, pattering barefoot over the newly tiled floors) to make as good a job of it as she possibly could. More: she owed it to herself.

She made it. Sometimes she was clinging on to financial solvency by her fingertips, or so it seemed; there was that awful day when the staircase collapsed with half a family on the top landing and half in the hall (and nobody, thank God, in the middle); the bills came in and the money went out, and she never thought about leaving. Not once.

  
 _The reason she stayed_

'We don't have to stay, you know,' she said, soon after Sam came back to the island. 'Sometimes I think I only stayed here so that you'd know where to find me.'

Sam looked at her in that familiar, quizzical way. 'Do you want to go somewhere else?'

'No!' she said, without even having to think about it.

'That probably wasn't the only reason, then.'

She laughed. 'Well, I can think of lots of reasons to stay. So that Sophie will have a home to come back to, for example – but hey, I've got an email address now! It's not like she's going to lose touch with me, so that home wouldn't necessarily have to be here. Or because I've sunk so much time and money into this place that it owes me a sunny retirement.'

'That sounds more like a reason to leave, if you ask me,' Sam said. 'Cut your losses and get shot of the place while you can. But no, I don't want to. I've only just got here!'

'Fine. No: I'll tell you. For the past fifteen years I've been thinking, This place could be great, if only I had the money to refit the bathrooms, or convert the goat-house into a self-catering annexe, or start a café down at the harbour, or whatever. Not to mention the know-how to actually know where to even begin.'

'Well, I've got both,' Sam said. 'At your service.'

'I was hoping you'd say that,' Donna said, drily. 'And, you know what? I've never yet managed to do everything that I dreamed of for this place. I don't know, maybe I just wasn't _old_ enough, didn't have the experience – and then when I'd got it, I didn't have the money.

'I still want to. I think we can do it. And that's the reason I want to stay. If you do, too.'  



End file.
